Jane ziegelman 97 orchard an edible history ent (v5 0)

97 Orchard describes exactly how that challenge was met by five major immigrant groups: the Germans, Irish, German Jews,... But while 97 Orchard is concerned largely with a single immigr

97 Orchard

An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

Jane Ziegelman

For Andy

Introduction

One The Glockner Family

Two The Moore Family

Three The Gumpertz Family

Four The Rogarshevsky Family

Five The Baldizzi Family

Notes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Jane Ziegelman

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

97 Orchard tells the story of five immigrant families, each of them, as it happens, residents of a

single New York tenement in the years between 1863 and 1935 Though separated by time and

national background, the Glockners, the Moores, the Gumpertzes, the Rogarshevskys, and the

Baldizzis, were all players in the Age of Migration, a period of sweeping demographic change forboth the Old and New Worlds

Starting in Europe in the early 1800s, whole chunks of humanity streamed from the countryside

to the cities—the continent’s new manufacturing centers—in pursuit of work Those who could afford

to embarked on a trans-Atlantic migration, lured to the United States by the promise of American

prosperity and freedom 97 Orchard chronicles what became of those immigrants, but from a special

vantage point: it retells the immigrant story from the elemental perspective of the foods they ate

Within hours of landing, immigrants felt the keen pressures of assimilation Before they even leftEllis Island, many had already traded in their Old World identities for new American names Once onthe mainland, immigrants found it expedient to shed their native clothing and to dress like Americans.Men quickly adopted the ubiquitous derby Women abandoned their shawls and kerchiefs in favor ofAmerican-style coats and bonnets The immigrants learned to speak like Americans, subjected

themselves to the rigors of American sweatshops, and delighted in the popular culture of their

adopted home These same immigrants, however, went to extraordinary lengths to preserve their

traditional foods and food customs Transplanting Old World food traditions—many of them rooted inthe countryside—to the heart of urban America required both imagination and tenacity To compoundthe challenge, the immigrants’ eating habits oftentimes defied American culinary norms, and as theimmigrant population continued to swell, concerned citizens attempted to wean the foreigners fromtheir strange cuisine The immigrants’ food loyalties, however, were fierce Native foods providedthem with the comfort of the familiar in an alien environment, a form of emotional ballast for the

uprooted Within the immigrant community, food cemented relationships, and immigrants turned tofood as a source of ethnic or national pride As immigrant families put down roots, it also became asource of contention between parents and their American-born children for whom Old World foodscarried the stigma of foreignness

A large part of this story takes place in the immigrant kitchen For many immigrants, this was asmall, often windowless room in a five-or six-story brick tenement A form of urban housing thatbegan to appear on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1840s, tenements were the first Americanresidences built expressly for multiple families—in this case, working people The typical tenementhad an iron front stoop, a central stairwell, where children played and neighbors socialized, and fourapartments on every floor The tenement kitchen was furnished with a wood-or coal-burning stoveand little else Those at 97 Orchard, a well-equipped building for its time, were bereft of indoor

plumbing or any means of cold storage aside from the windowsill or fire escape, a makeshift “icebox” that only functioned in winter A place to cook and to eat, the kitchen was also used as a familyworkspace, a sweatshop, a laundry room, a place to wash one’s body, a nursery for the babies, and abedroom for boarders In this cramped and primitive setting, immigrant cooks brought their

formidable ingenuity to the daily challenge of feeding their families 97 Orchard describes exactly

how that challenge was met by five major immigrant groups: the Germans, Irish, German Jews,

Russian-Lithuanian Jews, and Italians.

East Side children were responsible for collecting wood and coal for the family stove.

To procure the ingredients they needed at prices they could afford, immigrant cooks depended onneighborhood food purveyors Upon landing in America, immigrant entrepreneurs quickly establishednetworks of food laborers, trades people, importers, peddlers, merchants, and restaurant-keepers.Many of these culinary workers have since vanished and are long-forgotten Among the disappeared

are the German krauthobblers, or “cabbage-shavers,” itinerant tradesmen who went door to door

slicing cabbage for homemade sauerkraut; the Italian dandelion pickers, women who scoured NewYork’s vacant lots for wild salad greens; and the urban goose-farmers, Eastern European Jews whoraised poultry in tenement yards, basements, and hallways

The networks they established met the foreigners’ own culinary needs, but in the process of

feeding themselves, they revolutionized how the rest of America ate

A time traveler to pre–Civil War New York or Boston or Philadelphia, who happened to arrive

at dinner time, could expect to encounter the following on the family table: roast beef stuffed withbread crumbs and suet, a dish of peas, and some form of pudding This was sustenance for the

professional or business class Further down the economic ladder, generations of working-class

Americans survived on “hash,” a composite of leftover meat scraps and potatoes One food that

united the “haves” and “have-nots” was pie Apple pie, cherry pie, berry pie, lemon pie, and mincepie were eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert The habit was so pronounced that immigrantsreferred to their American hosts as “pie-eaters.” Another universal food was oysters While

Americans devised a wealth of oyster-based recipes, including oyster patties and stews, they enjoyedthem best in their natural state, sold raw from the saloons and street stands that proliferated in

nineteenth-century cities

The immigrants that began to settle in the United States in the 1840s introduced Americans to anarray of curious edibles beyond their familiar staples: German wursts and pretzels, doughnut-shapedrolls from Eastern Europe known as “beygals,” potato pastries referred to as “knishes,” and the

elongated Italian noodles for which Americans had no name but came to know as spaghetti 97

Orchard describes how native-born Americans, wary of foreigners and their strange eating habits,

pushed aside their culinary (and other) prejudices to sample these novel foods and eventually to

claim them as their own

Aside from satisfying our culinary curiosity, the exploration of food traditions brings us eye toeye with the immigrants themselves It grants us access to the cavernous beer gardens that once linedthe Bowery, where entire German families—babies included—spent their Sundays, the immigrant’sonly day of leisure, over mugs of lager beer and plates of black bread with herring It is a door intothe East Side cafés where Jewish pushcart peddlers drank endless cups of hot tea with lemon,

accompanied by a plate of blintzes, and brings us face-to-face with the Italian laborers who formedtheir own all-male cooking communities to satisfy their longing for macaroni

On the streets of the Lower East Side, European food customs collided with the driving energy

of the American marketplace The tantalizing saga that ensued, an ongoing tug of war between

culinary tradition and American opportunity, goes to the heart of our collective identity as a country

of immigrants But while 97 Orchard is concerned largely with a single immigrant community,

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the history it tells transcends that one urban neighborhood Though on asmaller scale, comparable changes were underway in cities and towns across America whereverimmigrants settled In fact, though the actors have changed, the culinary revolution that began in thenineteenth century continues today among immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and LatinAmerica, who have brought their food traditions to this country and continue to transform the wayAmerica eats

CHAPTER ONE

The Glockner Family

The Lower East Side of Manhattan, circa 1863, was a neighborhood of squat wooden row houses,shelter for a population of artisans, laboring people, and small-time tradesmen Built decades earlier

as single-family homes, by the time of the Civil War the ground floor of the typical East Side

dwelling was generally taken up by a grog shop or grocery with a small apartment behind the storefor the shopkeeper’s family Two more families lived on the second floor, while the basement wasrented out to lodgers More imposing structures could be found on the neighborhood’s oldest streets.Made of stone, with peaked tile roofs, these were the former homes of New York’s merchant princes,now converted into boardinghouses and cheap hotels that catered to a mainly immigrant clientele Butthe East Side was also home to a strictly modern form of urban housing: the tenement—a five-or six-story brick building with multiple apartments on every floor Their massive size, along with theirplain facades, reminded nineteenth-century New Yorkers of army barracks, and they were often

referred to that way, even by the people who lived in them

Hidden behind the dwellings, in the shadowy courtyards within each city block, were machineshops, print shops, brick-makers, furniture and piano factories, to name just a few of the local

industries Another kind of factory was concealed within the tenement itself Here, in apartments thatdoubled as sweatshops (a term that had not yet been coined), immigrant workers produced clothing,lace, cigars, and artificial flowers for ladies’ bonnets, a valued commodity in the hat-wearing culture

of the nineteenth century More evident to the casual observer, however, was the neighborhood’svibrant commercial life In other parts of the city, people lived in private homes on relatively quietresidential streets but shopped and caroused on the noisier, more bustling avenues On the Lower EastSide, that distinction was blurred Some kind of shop or business occupied the street level of mostEast Side buildings, turning the neighborhood into a single teeming marketplace East Side shops sold

a vast array of goods, from rusted scrap metal and secondhand corsets to peacock feathers and

beaver-skin coats There were shoe and hat shops, apothecaries, blacksmiths, glaziers, and tailors.Most plentiful, however, were businesses related to food The impressive concentration of food

markets and food peddlers, of slaughterhouses, brewers, bakers, saloons, and beer halls satisfied theculinary needs of the immediate neighborhood At the same time, they played an essential role infeeding the larger city

The people who lived and worked on the Lower East Side were predominately immigrants and,

in lesser numbers, people of color—freed slaves and the descendants of slaves Those sections of theLower East Side that had been settled chiefly by Germans were collectively known as

Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany,” covering the area from 14th Street south to Division Street

and from the Bowery all the way east to the river The businesses here were German-owned; the

newsboys hawked German-language newspapers, and the corner markets sold loaves of colored pumpernickel and rosy-pink Westphalian hams This semi-discrete corner of New York, a

molasses-city within a molasses-city, was the world inhabited by Lucas Glockner, his wife, Wilhelmina, and their fivechildren It is also the world we are about to enter.

But before we do, let’s have Mr Glockner say a few words on his own behalf Dead now forover a century, he speaks to us nonetheless with the help of certain official documents, key amongthem the federal census report The first census in which his name appears was taken in 1850, roughlyfour years after Glockner’s arrival in New York While the United States government had been

counting its citizens since 1790, the 1850 census was groundbreaking in one respect: for the first time,

it recorded the names of all household members, including women, servants, slaves, and children.Because of this innovation, we know that in 1850, Mr Glockner lived on the Lower East Side at 118Essex Street, along with his first wife, Caroline, a four-year-old son named Edward, and a baby

named George, who was one at the time and would not survive In this document, Mr Glockner

describes himself as a tailor, the leading occupation among New York Germans According to the

1850 census, he is one of seven tailors, all of them German, living in the same small building

1870 census record for Lucas Glockner and his family Census records, among other official documents, provide valuable information on the lives of otherwise anonymous immigrants.

The next time we hear from him, the United States is locked in a bloody civil war, and LucasGlockner, along with thousands of other East Side Germans, has been registered to serve in the UnionArmy According to an 1864 draft record, a beautiful, hand-lettered document, he is still employed as

a tailor Other sources tell us, however, that Glockner is ready to abandon tailoring for the more

lucrative career of a New York property owner In fact, he has already made his first investment

Glockner and his two partners have pooled their money to buy up the Dutch Reformed PresbyterianChurch, not for the building but for the land underneath it: a plot large enough to fit three typical EastSide tenement buildings By the time of the next census in 1870, Glockner has become a rent-

collecting landlord, the owner of several East Side properties

By 1880, Glockner is living at 25 Allen Street with his considerably younger wife, Wilhelmina.Together they have three children: Ida, Minnie, and William Neither of the girls is attending school,which shouldn’t surprise us If they weren’t earning money as seamstresses or flower-makers, EastSide girls were generally kept at home to help with the unpaid business of housework Fifteen-year-old William, on the other hand, is enrolled in college, a very good indication that he will go on towork in an office—as a clerk, perhaps, or a bookkeeper, the kind of job that immigrant parents

dreamed of for their sons And Mr Glockner? Living comfortably off his various properties (he

owned at least three buildings by this time), he has earned the right to a new job title At fifty-nineyears old, Glockner describes himself as a “Gentleman.” And there we have it, from tailor to

gentleman, the basic trajectory of one human life Mr Glockner’s autobiography

Glockner earned his fortune by investing in the kind of buildings he knew best, the multifamilydwellings known as “tenant houses,” or “tenements” for short His first property was 97 OrchardStreet, the five-story brick structure that stands at the core of our story Built by Glockner on the

grounds of the old Dutch Church, it was a compact building designed to maximize space, the mandatebehind all tenement architecture Covering a scant three hundred and fifty square feet, the OrchardStreet apartments were minuscule by today’s standards, the largest room not much bigger than a NewYork taxi And yet, Glockner’s building had a sense of style about it, both inside and out, a breakfrom the tenement tradition up to that time

Tenements, loosely defined, began to appear in New York sometime in the 1820s, many of themclustered in the old Five Points, a section of the Lower East Side that is now part of Chinatown Incolonial times, that same patch of New York had been a semi-industrial area of slaughterhouses,tanneries, breweries, rope-and candle-makers, all centered around a five-acre pond known as theCollect In the early 1800s, the Collect was drained and filled, though not very effectively A

neighborhood of wood-frame row houses grew up on the site, but after a good hard rain,

foul-smelling muck would well up from the ground, as if the former pond was reclaiming its rightful place.The terrible stench, along with the fear of disease, pushed out the old inhabitants, the merchants, andthe craftsmen, making way for a less privileged class of day laborers, boot blacks, and laundresses.Desperate for shelter, they moved into old single-family homes, which had been carved up into

apartments These improvised structures were the city’s original tenements

The appearance of the tenement coincided exactly with a sharp rise in immigration that began inthe 1820s, gathering momentum in the 1830s and 1840s In its wake, the population of New Yorksuddenly ballooned, creating the city’s first housing crisis City landlords quickly grasped how toprofit from the situation They bought up old houses, stables, and workshops, or converted buildingsthey already owned, dividing them up into cubbyhole-sized living quarters For businessmen of thetime, including John Jacob Astor, a major investor in the East Side housing boom, the tenement was areal estate windfall Among the first purposefully built tenements was a five-story brick structure onWater Street, near the East River, financed by a New York businessman named James Allaire, owner

of the Allaire Iron Works, a company that made steamship engines Since nineteenth-century

employers often supplied their workers with room and board, it seems a good possibility that

Allaire’s tenement was built for his employees

The history behind 97 Orchard sets it apart from the investments of the Astors and Allaires of

New York Where most East Side developers were “building down,” creating housing for people farbeneath them in the social hierarchy, 97 Orchard was built by an East Side immigrant for peoplemuch like himself In fact, Glockner and his family lived at 97 for the first half dozen years of thebuilding’s existence and remained tied to it through a web of personal relationships long after theymoved The Glockners had friends at 97, like Natalie Gumpertz, the German dressmaker abandoned

by her husband, and John Schneider, who ran a saloon in the building’s basement More personalstill, one of Glockner’s sons eventually married the daughter of an Orchard Street tenant and movedinto the building with his new wife

The red-brick facade of 97 Orchard is an example of nineteenth-century Italianate design, verymuch in fashion during the 1860s Typical of an Italianate row house, the kind seen farther uptown,the doorway at 97 Orchard is framed by a stone arch Curved lintels and a stone sill border the

windows, while the roof line is defined by a surprisingly ornate cornice Though made of cast metal,

it was finished to resemble brownstone, a more expensive building material In fact, all of the

building’s decorative elements were much simplified, discount versions of their uptown counterparts,the best that Glockner could afford The basement at 97, which sits just below street level, is

occupied by stores, one on either side of the building’s front stoop

On climbing the stoop, one enters the residential part of the building The first room is a

vestibule, or entryway, the walls lined with panels of white marble On the far side of the vestibuledoor, a narrow hallway leads to a plaster arch Passing under it, the hallway widens Directly ahead

is the heavy wooden stairway that runs up the center of the building

The apartments at 97 Orchard comprise three small rooms, a parlor, a kitchen, and a

windowless “dark room” used for sleeping Despite their size, the rooms are smartly finished withlight oak baseboards and chair rails that match the doors and window frames The walls are painted

in pastel shades like salmon pink and pale mint green, while the ceilings are painted a soft shade ofsky blue Each apartment has two fireplaces, one in the kitchen used for cooking, and another in theparlor with a wooden mantel and slate hearthstone

It had taken Glockner years of saving to buy the Orchard Street real estate and put up his

building, a huge investment for an immigrant tailor, and a huge risk as well Though he still had histrade, all of his capital was now in the building, a precarious state of affairs for a man in his fortieswith a family to support Despite all this, Glockner embellished his property with marble paneling,arched doorways, chair rails, fireplaces with proper mantels All of these flourishes are

representative of Glockner’s attempt to reach beyond Kleindeutschland and participate in the larger

and more affluent culture of middle-class New York

Though he splurged on décor, he skimped in other ways Of all his money-saving strategies, nonewas more glaring than the absence of indoor plumbing By 1863, pipes carrying fresh water from theCroton aqueduct had been laid under Orchard Street, and Glockner could have easily tapped into theunderground system Instead, he provided the building with a row of privies and an outdoor pump,both located in the building’s back courtyard Everyone who lived at 97 felt the impact of Glockner’sdecision, but no one felt it more than the building’s women Tenement housewives were like humanfreight elevators, hauling groceries, coal, firewood, and children up and down endless flights of

stairs Their most burdensome loads, however, were the tubs of water needed for laundry, bathing,house-cleaning, and cooking It was sloppy, muscle-straining work, water sloshing everywhere,

soaking the stairs and the women too, a bone-chilling prospect on a cold February morning,

especially since the stairs were unheated

Once a week the tenement kitchen served as a laundry room Women and girls were

responsible for hauling water up and down the stairs.

CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare

Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

The premium on water shaped the way women cooked in the tenements Climbing up and downthree or four flights of stairs just to wash a dish is strong motivation to cook as simply and efficiently

as possible Lucky for Mrs Glockner, Germans were expert stew-makers, a very useful culinary skillsince it provided an entire meal using a single pot Following German tradition, lunch was the

heartiest meal of the day in the Glockner apartment In the evening, the family might have boiled eggs,

or bread and cheese, but lunch was a time to feast, time to fill your stomach with a good Germanfricassee of beef or veal or pork, served with boiled dumplings or maybe noodles

Imagine, for a moment, a typical morning in the Glockner household Mrs Glockner is out,

shopping for groceries, the baby is upstairs with a neighbor, so Mr Glockner can attend to his

accounts At a small table by the parlor window, bent over his ledger, twirling the end of his ratherbushy mustache, he loses himself in the rows of numbers Very satisfying, he thinks, to see them alllined up so neatly (After decades as a tailor, he appreciates good craftsmanship.) His thoughts areinterrupted by the return of his wife Hanging her cloak on a brass hook next to the door, she gives herhands a brisk rub to get the circulation back (the fall weather has suddenly turned cold) and lights afire in the new black stove Now she turns her attention to fixing the stew The smell of browningonions reminds her husband that it’s time for his mid-morning snack, so he trots downstairs to

Schneider’s Saloon, conveniently located in the basement of the building, for a quick pint of beer and

a plate of herring He spends an hour or so chatting with Schneider, by which time the stew is nearlyready

Recipes for German stews of the period can be found in the Praktisches Kochbuch (Practical

Cookbook), by Henrietta Davidis, Germany’s answer to Fanny Farmer Originally published in

Germany in 1845, the Praktisches Kochbuch offers a sweeping view of what Germans were eating in

the nineteenth century The book was tremendously popular, selling over 240,000 copies in the

author’s lifetime Some of those copies traveled to America in immigrant suitcases Additional copieswere shipped across the Atlantic and sold in German-language bookstores in the United States In

1879, a German-bookstore owner in Milwaukee, a city with a large German community, published

the first American edition of Henrietta Davidis under the title Praktisches Kochbuch fur die

Deutschen in Amerika (or Practical Cookbook for Germans in America) A bestseller in immigrant

circles, the book was reprinted several times The first English translation, which appeared in 1897,reached a different and wider audience It was for the immigrants’ children and grandchildren, peoplewho spoke English as their first language, and who had perhaps lost touch with the cooking traditions

of their German ancestors But the book also appealed to ordinary Americans of any background,since by 1897, many had sampled German cooking and wanted to know more

The Practical Cookbook contains many stew-like recipes, some called “fricassees” and some

“ragouts,” but all of them savory concoctions of meat, vegetables, broth, and assorted seasonings Arecipe for stewed duck with dumpling uses pork fat, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, onion, andlemon peel to flavor the cooking stock A recipe for stewed leg of mutton calls for the meat, which

“should not be too fresh,” to be simmered in water and beer, and seasoned with “cloves,

peppercorns, three bay leaves, a few whole onions, and a bunch of green herbs, such as garden rue,marjoram, and sweet basil.”1 The generous use of spices and fresh herbs, the hint of tartness fromlemon or vinegar, make all these dishes typically German But for even more concentrated flavor, the

Practical Cookbook provides a recipe for spiced vinegar, a condiment for sprinkling over stews at

the table, like a German form of Tabasco sauce The potent mixture calls for a “half ounce of mace,some cloves (or, if preferred, garlic), ginger, one ounce of mustard seed, a pinch of whole whitepepper, a piece of grated horseradish, a handful of salt, six or eight bay leaves,” all steeped in a jar

of vinegar along with sixty whole walnuts.2

In the world of German stews, perhaps no dish was more highly flavored than hasenpfeffer, a ragout made from wild rabbit Immigrants brought their love for hasenpfeffer to New York, where

German saloon-keepers gave bowls of it to anyone who paid for a drink Below is a recipe for

hasenpfeffer by Gesine Lemcke, a German immigrant who opened a successful cooking school on

Manhattan’s Union Square She also wrote cooking columns for the Brooklyn Eagle, which is where

this recipe appeared in 1899:

HASENPFEFFER

Cut two well-cleaned rabbits into pieces, season them with one tablespoonful salt, put them

in a bowl, add two large onions cut in slices, six cloves, twelve whole allspices, and halftablespoonful whole peppers, cover with vinegar; cover the bowl and let stand three days.When ready to cook, put the rabbits with the vinegar and all the other ingredients into asaucepan over the fire, add half pint water and tablespoonful sugar, boil till tender In themeantime, melt one heaping tablespoonful butter, add one heaping tablespoon flour, stiruntil light brown, strain the rabbit broth, add it to the flour and butter, stir and cook to asmooth creamy sauce, lay the rabbit in a hot dish and pour the sauce over it Serve withsmall browned potatoes cooked in deep fat or serve with potato dumplings.3

The following is a recipe for German-style veal stew with celery root and dried pear Lemon,mace, clove, and bay leaves are the main seasonings, a combination often found in German-Americancookbooks of the period Bringing together meat, root vegetables, and fruit is another common

German touch.

VEAL STEW WITH DRIED PEAR

2 ½ pounds veal stew meat

½ pound veal or beef bones

3 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, chopped

½ cup chopped parsley root

1 rounded tablespoon flour

small pinch of mace (about 1/8 teaspoon)

2 whole cloves

1 ½–2 cups beef stock

6 stalks parsley

8 dried pear halves, cut in half lengthwise

1 medium celery root, peeled, cut in half then thinly sliced

½ lemon, thinly sliced into rounds

Rinse the meat and pat dry In a large Dutch oven or heavy stew pot, melt 2 tablespoons ofthe butter When it begins to foam, add veal in batches Be careful not to crowd the pot orthe meat won’t brown properly Let the veal cook, untouched, five minutes or so beforeturning it to brown the other side You should also brown the bones Remove veal, bonesand all, from the pot To the same pot, add onion and parsley root Sauté until golden,

adding more butter if needed Add the flour, and stir for a minute or so Return veal to thepot, seasoning it with salt and pepper, mace and cloves Add the beef stock, just enough tocover, along with bay leaves, 6 stalks parsley, and dried pear Simmer very gently for

about 1 ½ hours Add celery root and cook another half hour In the last ten minutes, add thesliced lemon.4

In German kitchens, the traditional accompaniments to stew were some form of dumplings Breaddumplings, potato dumplings, flour dumplings, dumplings made with cabbage, bacon, liver, ham,sweetbreads, or even calf’s brain—these are just a few of the dumpling recipes found in early

German-American cookbooks In most volumes, an entire chapter is given over to them, both savoryand sweet The following bread-based recipe for “Green Dumplings,” flecked with bits of choppedparsley, spinach, and chive, is from Henrietta Davidis:

GREEN DUMPLINGS (A SUABIAN [SIC] RECIPE)

A handful of parsley, the same quantity of spinach, half as much chervil and chives, chopall together and stew in butter for a few moments Then mix with 2 grated rolls, 2 eggs, saltand pepper, form into little balls, and let them come just to a boil in the finished soup, or

they will fall to pieces These dumplings are very nice in the Spring.5

The alternative to dumplings was noodles, a Bavarian specialty that German cooks adapted from theItalians, their neighbors to the south In the German state of Swabia, cooks perfected a technique formaking the pebble-shaped noodle known as spaetzle Bavarians made threadlike soup noodles andthick, chewy noodles eaten as a side dish Here is Ms Lemcke’s recipe from 1899:

EGG NOODLES

Put one cup of flour in a bowl, add two eggs, a small piece of butter the size of a hazelnut, apinch of salt, and two tablespoonfuls cold water, mix this into a dough, adding more flour ifnecessary, turn the dough onto a board and work it till stiff and smooth, divide it into fourparts, roll each part out very thin, hang them over the edge of a bowl to dry, then roll each

piece up like a music roll and if the nudels are wanted for soup cut them as fine as

possible, and if wanted to be served with fricassee in place of vegetables cut them finger wide As soon as they are cut, shake them apart on a floured board and let them lieuntil perfectly dry.6

half-In 1865, Orchard Street alone was home to at least ten grocery stores, most of them German-owned.Ten years earlier, the same stores would have been in Irish hands As German immigrants flowed intothe city in the 1850s, the balance began to shift By 1860, the German corner grocery had become aNew York fixture, not just on the Lower East Side but throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn too

The trick to running a successful grocery was to “have a little bit of everything and no greatquantity of anything.” These stores typically carried a small selection of fruits and vegetables, milkand butter, canned goods, coal, kerosene, kindling wood, sugar, soap, rolled oats, crackers, cigars,and for their German customers, imported delicacies like Westphalian ham, caviar, sausages,

sauerkraut, and poppy-seed oil But their bestselling item was alcohol, usually whiskey, which

provided the grocer with most of his income As it happens, 97 Orchard Street was literally flanked

by grocers If Mrs Glockner needed a cup of milk or a loaf of bread, she could dash downstairs andbuy it from either Frederick Aller at number 95 or Christian Munch at 99 Most likely, she bought oncredit, the normal way of doing business for a grocer of the period At the end of the business week,her husband would drop by the store and pay the bill

For more serious shopping, Mrs Glockner hooked her basket over one arm and headed for thepublic market on Grand Street, one of roughly a dozen scattered through Lower Manhattan The publicmarkets were large, shedlike structures with rows of individual stalls, the largest by far the

Washington Market on the Lower West Side Conveniently located near the busy docks along theHudson River, this was the place where most of the food consumed in New York was bought andsold

A quick scan of city newspapers circa 1860 reveals how much negative attention was generated

by the public markets The main complaint: dirt The following “warning” ran in the New York Times

in May 1854:

If you are going to market this morning, be pleased to put on thick, stout shoes, and a dress that will not readily show dirt For of all the dirty places in the City, our Public Markets are the dirtiest In the fish markets the floors are slippery and constantly wet.

In the meat market, giblets are scattered about the floor, unsightly objects are obtruded

at all points, and refuse meats are frequently only swept out under the eaves, and left to disgust all passersby.7

Aside from the filth, the condition of the buildings themselves, patched together and

half-disintegrating, was deplorable Among the most decrepit was the Fulton Market, “a filthy wood-shedwith its leaky roof and tottering chimneys.”8 For observers of the time, it was hard to reconcile thedirt and decay of the markets with the stature of New York, the largest, richest city in America “TheMetropolitan city of New York has endured the stigma of being, without question, the most illy-

supplied with public food markets of any civilized centre of population of even one-tenth its

pretensions,” is how one critic put it.9

The attitude of shamed outrage was just about universal, but not quite The many accusationshurled at the markets belied an immutable fact, one recognized by a select handful of supporters Themarket system supplied New Yorkers with a staggering variety of meats, fish, fowl, vegetables, and

fruits The following description comes from The Great Metropolis, Junius Henri Browne’s 1869

guide to New York At the Washington Market, he tells us,

Nothing is lacking to gratify the palate,—to delight the most jaded appetite The best beef, mutton, veal and lamb the country affords are displayed upon the stalls Those roasts and steaks, those hind-quarters, those cutlets, those breasts with luscious

sweetbreads, would make an Englishman hungry as he rose from the table Those

delicate bits, so suggestive of soups, would moisten the mouth of a Frenchman Those piles of rich juicy meats would render an Irishman jubilant over the memory of his

determination to emigrate to a land where potatoes were not the chief article of food What an exhibition of shell-fish, too! Crabs, and lobsters, and oysters in pyramids, yet dripping with sea-water, and the memories of their ocean-bowers fresh about them And vegetables of every kind, and fruits, foreign and domestic, from the rarest to the

commonest, from the melon to the strawberry, from the pine apple to the plum Fish from the river and mountain stream, from the sea and the lake Fowls and game of all

varieties, from barnyard and marsh, forest and prairie.10

Critics of the public market took for granted the feast available to them on a daily basis; they wereequally blasé about the tremendous human effort required to assemble all those varied goods: beefand pork transported by rail from the Midwest; vegetables, butter, cheese, and milk from the farms ofConnecticut, New Jersey, and Long Island; stone fruits and melons from the South, along with fish andseafood shipped from all points along the Eastern Seaboard

A leading defender of the markets was Thomas De Voe, a New York butcher who leased a stall

in the Jefferson Market at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Street A portrait of DeVoe shows him in typical butcher’s costume: a top hat and long apron, a knife in one hand, poised

before a rack of meat, ready to slice.

Born in 1811, De Voe worked as a butcher’s apprentice as a young boy and remained with theprofession until 1872, the year he was appointed superintendent of markets for the city of New York.But De Voe was an intellectual as well, intensely curious about the world of the market and how itevolved In 1858, he presented a paper on the history of the markets to the New-York Historical

Society, which he later expanded and published as The Market Book His next project, The Market

Assistant, was an encyclopedic and exhaustively researched survey of “every article of human food

sold in the public markets of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.”11 The result of hisefforts is a precise record of culinary consumption in urban America It tells us, for example, thatNew Yorkers once dined on buffalo, bear, venison, moose (the snout was especially delectable),otter, swan, grouse, and dozens of other species, wild and domestic; that fish dealers offered fifteentypes of bass, six types of flounder, and seventeen types of perch; and that shoppers at the producestalls could choose between purslane, salsify, borage, burdock, beach plum, black currants,

mulberries, nanny berries, black gumberries, and whortleberries

Portrait of Thomas De Voe, scholar and defender of the New York public markets.

Science, Industry & Business Library, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden

Foundations

Business at the public markets followed a predictable daily rhythm It began at four in the

morning, when the wholesale customers—the restaurant owners, hotel caterers, and grocers—arrived

at the sprawling Washington Market to buy their supplies Next to arrive were the well-heeled

shoppers: those who could afford the choicest cuts of meat and the freshest produce They came in

person, both men and women, or sent their cooks By afternoon, the best goods had disappeared andprices began to fall Now it was time for the bargain shoppers, women from middle-class and poorfamilies, to buy their provisions But the keenest hunters of bargains were the boardinghouse cooks,the last customers of the day, who filled their baskets with leathery steaks and slightly rancid butter.Descriptive accounts of the New York markets present scenes of great kinetic energy Here is

one especially vivid passage from Scribner’s Monthly:

Choose a Saturday morning for a promenade in Washington Market, and you shall see a sight that will speed the blood in your veins,—matchless enterprise, inexhaustible spirit and multitudinous varieties of character…You cannot see an idle trader The poulterer fills in his spare moments in plucking his birds, and saluting the buyers; and while the butcher is cracking a joint for one purchaser he is loudly canvassing another from his small stand, which is completely walled in with meats All the while there arises a din of clashing sounds which never loses pitch Yonder there is a long counter, and standing behind it in a row are about twenty men in blue blouses, opening oysters Their

movements are like clock-work Before each is a basket of oysters; one is picked out, a knife flashes, the shell yawns, and the delicate morsel is committed to a tin pail in two or three seconds.12

Artists were also drawn to the markets Their challenge was to capture the ceaseless activity ofthe market in a single, unmoving image One particularly successful illustration depicts the arrival offresh Georgia watermelons at the Fulton Market In this scene, a good cross-section of New York hasswarmed the melon stand: barefoot street children, tramps, working men of color, housewives inbonnets, a mustachioed gentleman in a silk top hat As the image makes clear, the markets were

democratic in character, serving the broadest range of New Yorkers from Fifth Avenue tycoons todowntown street urchins

The watermelon stand at the Fulton Street market, 1875.

Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

The Essex Market on Grand Street, where Mrs Glockner did her shopping, was a three-storybrick building that ran the entire length of one city block In design, it resembled a medieval fortresswith massive square towers at each corner Like other market buildings, it served more than one

purpose Food sellers occupied the ground floor, while the upper floors were home to a courthouse, apolice station, a jail, a dispensary, and, in later years, a makeshift grammar school

The Essex Market housed twenty vegetable and poultry stalls, eight butter and cheese stalls, sixfish stalls, twenty-four butcher stalls, two stalls for smoked meat, two for coffee and cake, and onefor tripe In all likelihood, this is where Mrs Glockner bought her veal bones, pig’s knuckles,

cabbage, salsify (a root vegetable much loved by the Germans), plums, and apples It’s also whereshe shopped for fish

Predictably enough, the biggest fish-eaters in pre-modern Germany lived in coastal areas alongthe Baltic and the North Sea Here, fishing boats trawled for cod, salmon, whitefish, flounder, amongother forms of marine life Their most prolific catch, however, was the diminutive herring In its freshform, this small, silvery fish (cousin to the sardine), figured prominently in the local diet Preservedherring, meanwhile, became an important trading commodity Cured in brine and packed into barrels,

it traveled inland and established itself in the German kitchen In the nineteenth century, immigrantsbrought their taste for herring to America, where it was never too popular among native-born citizens.Still, every winter, schoonerloads of herring arrived at the wharves along the East River and weresold in the public markets, both fresh and salted Germans, along with the Irish, British, and Scots,were the main customers The herring found a more welcoming home in a new kind of American foodshop that began to appear on the Lower East Side sometime in the 1860s The Germans called themdelicatessens

The delicatessen shopper could choose among herring dressed in sour cream and mayonnaise,pickled herring, herring fried in butter, smoked herring, and rolled herring stuffed with pickles Therewas some version of a herring salad, a fascinating composition of flavors, textures, and colors Thefollowing is a typical example:

HERRING SALAD

A very popular German salad is made in this manner: Soak a dozen pickled Holland

herring overnight, drain, remove the skin and bones, and chop fine Add a pint of cookedpotatoes, half a pint of cooked beets, half a pint of raw apples, and six hard-boiled eggschopped in a similar manner, and a gill each of minced onions and capers Use Frenchdressing Mix well together Fill little dishes with the mixture, and trim the tops with

parsley, slices of boiled eggs, beets, etc.13

The building at 97 Orchard Street stands atop a natural elevation that protects it from flooding, aproblem that afflicted most other sections of the Lower East Side Thanks to that subtle rise, the

building’s rooftop offered sweeping views of the surrounding neighborhood Directly to the east lay atight grid of squat row houses Here and there, one of the newer tenements poked up awkwardly, abrick giant among dwarves In the courtyards formed by the grid, the square within each city block,were additional structures, “rear tenements,” as they were known, which provided New Yorkers withsome of the worst housing in the city Closer to the river, the rear tenements were replaced by

factories (most were for furniture), and past them, the shipyards Beyond lay the wharves, visibleonly as a thicket of ship’s masts Facing north, the grid opened slightly, the blocks were longer andthe avenues wider The buildings were newer and taller Tompkins Square (Germans called it the

Weisse Garten—the “white garden”) was among the few open spaces in the city grid Nearing the

river, the landscape turned more industrial, the tenements replaced by lumberyards, slaughterhouses,and breweries To the south, toward the narrow tip of Manhattan, lay the Five Points, a maze of

skinny passageways and tottering wooden houses Just beyond it rose the domed cupola of City Hall

To the west of Orchard Street stretched an unbroken string of saloons, restaurants, theaters, and beerhalls, some large enough to accommodate a crowd of three thousand This was the Bowery, NewYork’s main entertainment district Beyond it, Broadway, the city’s widest street, sliced the islandneatly down the middle

The view from 97 Orchard embraced roughly four city wards, a geographic designation datingback to 1686, when New York’s British governor divided Lower Manhattan into six political

districts, each one responsible for electing an alderman to sit on the Common Council, the city’s maingoverning body As the city expanded northward, new wards were created, so by 1860 it had twenty-two From the roof of 97 Orchard, the view encompassed the tenth ward (home to the Bowery), theseventeenth ward surrounding Tompkins Square, and the eleventh and thirteenth wards covering the

industrial blocks along the river Those same four wards made up Kleindeutschland, “Little

Germany,” the focus of our present story and the center of German life in New York

The residents of Kleindeutschland were largely urban people They had emigrated from cities in

Germany and knew how to manage in one (Immigrants from the German countryside generally passedthrough New York on their way to Missouri, Illinois, or Wisconsin, wide-open states where land wascheap and they could start farms.) New York Germans, by contrast, earned their living as merchants

or trades people Many were tailors, like Mr Glockner, but they were also bakers, brewers, printers,and carpenters Despite their shared roots, however, the residents of “Dutch-town,” as it was

sometimes called, were divided into small enclaves, a pattern that mirrored the cultural landscape ofnineteenth-century Germany

Maps of central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century show Der Deutsche Bund, “the German

League,” a confederation of thirty-nine small and large states The people who made up that

sprawling political body, however, were bound together in much smaller groups Nineteenth-centuryGermans identified themselves as Bavarians or Hessians or Saxons Their loyalties were regional,cemented by cultural forces like religion and language Depending largely on where he lived, a

German could be Catholic or Jewish or Lutheran or Calvinist Germans spoke a variety of local

dialects that were often unintelligible to outsiders And each region had developed its own food

traditions that the immigrants carried with them to New York

Very broadly speaking, the culinary breakdown looked something like this: Germans from

southern states like Swabia, Baden, and Bavaria depended on dumplings and noodles, a class of

foods which the Germans called Mehlspeisen (roughly, “flour foods”), as their main source of

calories Northerners, meanwhile, relied more on potatoes, beans, and pulses like split peas andlentils Where northerners tended to use pork fat as a cooking medium, southerners used butter Wherenortherners consumed large amounts of saltwater fish, southerners ate freshwater species like pikeand carp Though Germany was a nation of sausage-eaters, every region, and many cities, produced

its own local version So, Bavarians had weisswurst (white sausage), a specialty of Munich, while Swabians had blutwurst (blood sausage) and Saxons had rotwurst (red sausage) The residents of Frankfurt, a city in Hesse, consumed a local sausage called Frankfurter wurst, the ancestor of the

American hot dog Turning to baked goods, Berlin was the city of jelly doughnuts, while Dresdenproduced stollen, and Nuremburg made gingerbread And finally, the liquid portion of the meal.

While beer was the national beverage, Germans also enjoyed cider, the regional favorite in Hesse,while Badeners favored wine and northerners preferred a local version of schnapps

As they settled on the Lower East Side, Germans tended to form village-like clusters, a

settlement pattern repeated again and again with successive immigrant groups It was a precariouslife, especially at first, so Germans from the same town or city banded together to form

landsmanschaften, clubs that offered a crude but important form of life insurance To join, the

immigrant paid an initiation fee of two or three dollars, then monthly fees of a quarter or less In

return, members were invited to picnics and dances, but more important, the pooled money went tohelp members in distress, people who were sick or who couldn’t work for one reason or another But

the landsmanschaften’s true raison d’être was death When a member died, the club paid for the

burial—it also supplied the burial plot—and ensured a good turnout at the funeral

Beginning in the 1850s, the Lower East Side saw a steady flow of outside visitors, among them cityofficials and social reformers who came to investigate tenement living conditions Journalists flocked

to the tenements in search of human-interest stories, which they found in great supply Each of thesegroups set down their observations, leaving us with a large body of descriptive writing A number ofthemes snake through this literature A few of the most persistent are overcrowding in the tenements,the absence of sunlight, and the absence of fresh air, the three evils which outsiders identified as thecrux of “the tenement problem.” (Visitors were much less interested in the low wages and high rentsthat made crowding necessary.) Closely related to evil number three were the smells of the tenement,

a topic that captivated uptown visitors, who prowled the East Side wards with handkerchiefs held

before their noses The following account, taken from an 1865 article in the New York Times,

describes an interview with an East Side woman who lived in Fisher’s Alley, a particularly fragrantstrip in the old fourth ward:

We were greeted courteously by an old woman with a short garment and a pipe not much longer, and by her we were entertained with a vivid description of life in Fisher’s alley Fights, rows, scrambles for supremacy, sickness, death, much misery, but, on the whole, not so bad as it might be Dirt in every shape, filth of every name, smells in every degree, from the faintest suggestion of fat-boiling, through the inter-mediate gradings of close, heated rooms, unswept floors, perspiratory and unwashed babies, unchanged beds, damp walls, and decayed matter, to the full-blown stench which arose from the liquid ooze from the privy—these combined failed to impress the speaker or, indeed, any of the

slightly-clad women who joined us in the passage, as anything to feel annoyed about, and we left her with the conviction that, however wretched and offensive she was, she had at least the consolation of not knowing it.14

The gulf between tenement dwellers and their uptown observers was so wide that the Times’s

reporter felt perfectly free to share his disgust for the courteous old woman and her pungent

suroundings, confident that his readers would feel the same

Reporters generally gravitated to the worst buildings in the poorest sections, but even in a kept tenement the air was thick with competing odors Especially in winter, when doors and windowswere closed to shut out the cold, the tenement became a kind of hothouse in which smells bloomed,instead of flowers In the German wards, however, one especially potent smell overwhelmed the rest:the sulfury, penetrating tang of sauerkraut.

well-In the patchwork that made up Kleindeutschland, sauerkraut was everywhere It cut across

ethnic boundaries and economic ones, too, consumed by rich and poor alike Between late Octoberand early December, tenement housewives (and saloon keepers as well) turned their energies to

sauerkraut-making, producing enough in those few weeks to last through most of the year In a Cuisinart world, the chopping of that much cabbage was a daunting project, so women enlisted the

pre-help of an itinerant tradesman known as a krauthobler or “cabbage-shaver.” With a tool designed

specifically for the task—it worked like a French mandolin, the blades set into a wooden board—the

krauthobler went door to door, literally shaving cabbages into thread-like strands The cost was a

penny a head

Once the cabbage was shaved, the housewife took over She scoured an empty liquor or vinegarbarrel and lined it with whole cabbage leaves Next came the shredded cabbage, which she saltedand pounded, layer by layer, until the barrel was nearly full Now she covered the cabbage with acloth, then a piece of wood cut to the size of the opening, weighing it down with a stone Left on itsown, the salted cabbage began to weep, creating its own pickling brine Once a week, the housewifetended to her barrel, rinsing the cloth to prevent contamination and skimming the brine

Sauerkraut-making in the tenements was a harvest ritual, a celebration of the autumn bounty Likeall seasonal rites, it marked the passage of time Its power came through repetition The scrubbing ofthe barrel, the arrival of the cabbage-shaver, the salting and pounding, were all steps in a familiarroutine that the immigrant housewife carried with her from Germany Seasonal food traditions, likesauerkraut-making, supplied an uprooted community with a sense of order At Christmas, the Germans

baked squares of lebkuchen, or honey cake; loaves of stollen, a sweetbread studded with raisins, and trays of pfeffernusse, peppery spice cookies coated in sugar syrup In spring, for just a few weeks, German saloons served up mugs of dark bock beer Summer in Kleindeutschland arrived on

Pentecost Sunday, which the Germans marked with an all-day picnic Each of these food-based rites,carried over from Germany, was reenacted in a completely new context by the immigrants who

settled in New York and other cities throughout the United States Over the decades, as Germansassimilated into the wider culture, the need for the old rituals began to slip away, replaced in somecases by new American customs But assimilation moved in the opposite direction as well ManyGerman food traditions were adopted by the wider culture, so baking stollen became a Christmastradition in non-German families along with decorating the Christmas tree, another German

contribution to American home life

If fall was the season for sauerkraut-making, the payoff came in the first days of winter, when thecabbage was fully ripe and ready to be eaten It was a moment the Germans looked forward to

expectantly and enjoyed completely: “The look of pleasure on the bibulous German as he steps out ofhis favorite lager-beer saloon these cold days tells the passer-by as plainly as do the words that hangoutside the door that the day of sauerkraut lunch is here.”15 This happy vignette is taken from a

Philadelphia newspaper, another city with a large German community, but could just as easily

describe the saloon-goers of Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York

Alongside the krauthobler, a figure who had vanished from New York by the close of the Civil

War, the German appetite for pickled cabbage also supported sauerkraut importers, local cabbage

farmers, and eventually sauerkraut manufacturers, including Henry J Heinz, who opened a sauerkrautfactory on Long Island in the 1890s At the height of the busy season, his factory processed a hundredtons of cabbage a day On the streets, the most visible face of this trade was the “sauerkraut man,”actually a roving peddler who sold cheap meals to hungry East Siders Here he is in a 1902 article

from the New York Evening Post:

The regular and popular visitor to the German inns and taverns of the East Side is the sauerkraut man He brings his calling with him from the Old Country, and finds a more profitable field in New York than in Berlin or Hamburg His equipment is quite curious.

He wears a blue or white apron running from his neck nearly to the ankles, and from his shoulders is suspended a circular metal box which goes half way around his waist It has three large compartments, two of which are surrounded by hot water In one are well- cooked Frankfurter sausages, and in the other thoroughly boiled sauerkraut In the third compartment is potato salad He carries in his hand a basket in which are small plates and steel forks One sausage and a generous spoonful of sauerkraut and potato salad cost 5 cents All three articles are of good quality, well cooked and seasoned.16

The sauerkraut man worked at night, his shift starting at the close of the normal workday, when

customers poured into the saloons for an hour or two of relaxation Hauling his pewter box (it couldhold up to fifty sausages, seven pounds of sauerkraut, and seven of potato salad), the peddler madehis rounds stopping at bars, bowling alleys, and meeting halls, wherever hungry Germans gathered

To round out our look into German sauerkraut traditions, here is a recipe for a simple sauerkrautdish adapted from Henrietta Davidis

BOILED SAUERKRAUT

Bring to a boil one cup water and one cup white wine Add the sauerkraut, roughly 3 cups,

a few peppercorns and a little salt Simmer until tender Shortly before serving, pour off thebroth and stir in a few tablespoons butter Serve as a side dish alongside mashed potatoes

Nineteenth-century New York was a city of hand-painted signs, many of them wordless Butchers, forinstance, displayed a painted black bull (or sometimes a red cow) over their stalls in the market Out

on the street, passersby could identify a blacksmith’s shop by the image of a painted horse suspendedover the doorway Even more straightforward, New York restaurants often nailed a real tortoise shell

to the doorpost: their way of announcing that terrapin was on the menu In the city’s German wards, afew signs were especially common Two yellow boots, one larger for a man, the woman’s boot

smaller, was the image displayed by German shoemakers German beer halls hung pictures of KingGambrinus, the Dionysus of beer In some of the flashier examples, the mythic king was “presentedlife-size, bearded and crowned and holding in one hand a stupendous beaker of the national beverage,the froth of which bulges from the rim like a prize cauliflower.”17 The description comes from

Charles Dawson Shanley, a nineteenth-century poet and journalist who wrote a series of very

informative articles on New York street life On his rambles through Kleindeutschland, Shanley

encountered another frequently displayed shop sign, this one rather modest It was a “dingy little

signboard with a sheaf of wheat painted on it”—the image adopted by German bakers

Just as they lived together in clusters, immigrants tended to work together in the same trades.Many, as it happens, were food-related Where the Irish were big in the fish and oyster business,Germans worked as dairymen, grocers, and butchers Immigrant food purveyors sold to their owncommunities, but also played a role in feeding the larger city Through the first half of the nineteenthcentury, most of the city’s bakers were Scottish and Irish, but that began to change in the 1850s, asGermans flowed into New York By the end of the decade, responsibility for baking the city’s breadhad passed into German hands

The typical German bakery, housed in a tenement cellar, was a low-ceilinged room with a dirtfloor and no running water The “boss baker” often lived upstairs with his family and a handful ofemployees who shared the apartment as boarders Many times, though, employees slept in the cellarnext to the ovens, a sack of flour for their bed Some slept in the dough vats Economic survival forthe small-time baker depended on every member of the family The children worked as apprentices,while the baker’s wife was in charge of the boarders, for whom she cooked and did laundry On themost densely populated blocks in the German wards, a cellar bakery was found in every third orfourth building

Prior to the widespread use of steam power beginning in 1882, industry in New York ran onmuscle power, most of it supplied by immigrants In a city of shipbuilders, ironworkers, and

stonecutters, the baker’s life was especially harsh His shift started late in the afternoon and lasteduntil early morning, which meant a fourteen-hour workday or sometimes more At the end of the long,hot night (temperatures in the bakery could easily reach one hundred degrees), the bakers hauled theirgoods up to the street and loaded up the delivery wagons Now, finally, it was time to rest, just as thesun was coming up over the East River Faces caked with flour, the bakers slept while the rest of thecity went about its business It was a topsy-turvy existence and a lonely one, too For all his sweatywork, the journeyman baker earned between eight and eighteen dollars a week, hardly enough to

support a family The consequences were plain More than any other tradesmen, many New Yorkbakers were consigned to a life of bachelorhood

Before the appearance of national brands like Pepperidge Farm and Arnold, each city had itsown local bakeries and bread-making traditions The kind of bread produced in New York was

surprisingly similar to Wonder Bread, squishy and gummy-textured Known as the New York splitloaf, it was no more substantial than “slightly compressed white smoke” in the words of one critic,and just as tasteless German-made loaves of rye and pumpernickel fell at the other end of the bakedgoods spectrum They were made from whole grains, with a dense, chewy texture and a sour, mildlynutty flavor When sliced, they made a sturdy platform for the open-faced sandwiches that Germansloved to snack on When it came to New Yorkers and bread, a “Goldilocks syndrome” seemed toprevail If the New York split loaf was too puffy and bland, German-style breads were too coarseand heavy for the native-born, with their less vigorous digestive tracts The only reason to eat themwas the price, since ounce for ounce they were cheaper than white bread A brittle-crusted Frenchbaguette was much closer to the nineteenth-century ideal of what bread should be

A footnote to the German bread story centers around a New York immigrant named Louis

Fleischmann, born in Vienna in 1835 His early history had nothing to do with bread or baking

Rather, Fleischmann was a soldier, an officer in the Austrian army In the 1860s, his two brothers,Max and Charles, emigrated to Missouri, where they set up a business producing the kind of

compressed yeast used by Viennese bakers, a product unknown in America In 1874, Louis decided to

follow them In the centenary year of 1876, Louis and his brothers set up a “model Vienna bakery” atthe great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia A smashing success, its main product was somethingcalled “Vienna bread.” Buttery and delicate, with a glossy brown crust, it was the perfect texture fordunking in coffee Riding on the success of the model bakery, Louis Fleischmann opened a similarestablishment on Tenth Street and Broadway in New York.

The Vienna Bakery arrived on the gastronomic scene like a visiting dignitary Alongside theactual bakery, Fleischmann opened an elegant café that quickly became a favorite dining spot amongGerman intellectuals and opera stars It was also popular with New York society women, who

flocked to the bakery after a strenuous morning of shopping on the Ladies Mile, the strip of

department stores that once ran along Lower Broadway Of all the dishes on the menu, Vienna breadwas the star attraction When Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York in the 1890s,

he used to walk uptown from his office on Mulberry Street and stop at the bakery for a lunch of

Vienna bread and milk From Fleischmann’s bakery, Vienna bread spread to German bake shopsaround the city, but the stores most likely to carry it were on the Lower East Side An 1877 article onthe Vienna-bread phenomenon opens with the following observations:

One remarkable result of the Centennial exhibition is the striking and admirable fact that Vienna bread is now to be bought all over New York Indeed, we are quite sure that the genuine article is now more easily procurable in this city than in the Austrian

capital You will find it in the Bowery, and in the streets crossing that elegant avenue; nay, you shall not enter a little baker’s shop in Mackerelville without finding at least Vienna rolls upon the counter.18

When Louis Fleischmann died in 1904, the Vienna Bakery had already lost its glamour, though itremained in business for several decades The craze for Vienna bread was also starting to fade Theprecise date is hard to pinpoint, but sometime after World War I, when Germans and their food fellout of favor, it began its final descent into obscurity Even so, Fleischmann’s legacy continues, visible

on every packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast, the brand most used by American bakers for over acentury

The greatest contribution made by German bakers to the American kitchen came in the form ofyeast-based cakes, which began to appear in East Side bakeries during the second half of the

nineteenth century Though all were made from the same basic dough, they came in an assortment ofshapes and with a variety of toppings and fillings There were round cakes crowned with apple

slices, ring-shaped cakes filled with chopped nuts or poppy seeds, pretzel-shaped cakes, and cakesthat were rolled up like snails then brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and

currants The allure of these buttery confections quickly leapfrogged beyond Kleindeutschland into the wider city The Germans called them kuchen, but we know them as coffee cake.

In the 1870s, the New York Times ran a food-related column on their women’s page, called “The

Household.” Most columns opened with a round-up of what New Yorkers could expect to find at themarket that week, which foods were in good supply, which were scarce, and current prices The

market news was followed by a selection of recipes and household tips covering a broad range ofvery practical topics, like how to make glue or how to stop one’s shoes from squeaking The columnended with questions and requests from readers, including this one, which ran in 1876: “I would like

a receipt for pumpkin pie and German coffee-bread or coffee-cake like you get in the bakeries in NewYork and which cannot be found in the country.—JEWEL”19 Unfortunately, it seems that Jewel nevergot a response, but over the next few decades, recipes for German coffee cake began showing up inAmerican newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks The following recipe for a kind of circular coffee

cake called a kranzkuchen is courtesy of a German-American housewife who shared her

kuchen-making technique with a New York reporter It appeared in an 1897 feature under the headline

“Toothsome German Dishes, Lessons To Be Learned From The People Who Eat Five Meals A Day.”

KRANZKUCHEN

Take two pounds of flour, a pint and a half of milk, three eggs, a quarter of a pound of

butter Set a sponge with one pint of milk warmed, flour to make a stiff batter, and one cake

of compressed yeast When it has risen sufficiently, add the other ingredients, the butterbeing worked into the flour; then knead well The cake should be rolled, or better, pressedout with the fingers very thin for baking… The dough is…brushed over with melted butter,and upon the thin cake, sugar, cinnamon, chopped almonds, currants, and raisins are laid.The whole is rolled as a jelly cake, and then formed into a ring, Kranz, or double ring,pretzel, as desired, and also baked in a moderate oven When this is done, a thin frosting ofwhite of egg and sugar is spread over it, and the result is a very delicious cake, which iseaten with an excellent cup of coffee.20

Among the Germans’ most far-reaching gifts to American food ways wasn’t a food at all…

Beginning with the earliest settlements in Dutch New Amsterdam, our European ancestors displayed akeen fascination with the making and drinking of alcohol There were practical reasons for this taste:drinking water during that era was often polluted A strong taste for beer among seventeenth-centuryNew Yorkers gave way in the following century to the widespread consumption of locally producedrum, the same throat-scorching drink that played such an important role in the colonial slave trade.(Throughout the eighteenth century, rum was the single most important American export, much of itshipped to Africa and traded for living cargo.) In the years following the revolution, as the Americanrum industry began to falter, farmers in western states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinoisturned their crops into liquor Corn-based bourbon and grain-based whiskey soon eclipsed rum tobecome the new national drinks Through most of this period, Americans continued to gulp downhomemade forms of alcohol, including cider, apple jack, and dandelion wine The one drink they didnot have was lager, the crisp German-style beer so familiar to us today

Before 1840, all beer produced in the United States was English-style ale, full-bodied and

slightly fruity-tasting, with a deep caramel color and a high alcohol content Following British

brewing methods, it was made with a type of yeast that floats on the surface of the brew and fermentsrather quickly at relatively high temperatures German immigrant brewers brought to the United States

a separate brewing tradition that was based on a different strain of yeast, one that sinks in the vat.Known as bottom yeast, it ferments more slowly and at much lower temperatures, producing a beerthat is dryer, paler, and more refreshing than ale

The first German breweries in New York were small operations employing five or six men.German brewers followed the same basic plan as immigrant bakers: under the watchful eye of a

skilled brew master, the brewery workers put in sixteen-hour days of hard labor In return, they

received a small salary (between six and twelve dollars a month) plus room and board, along with allthe beer they could drink Since it took roughly one thousand dollars to open a brewery, the lagerentrepreneur—unlike other immigrant businessmen—was a person of means The great majority wereestablished beer manufacturers who brought to America a lifetime of brewing experience, includingtheir own closely guarded brewing formula Two of the first to get started in New York were a pair

of German brothers, Max and Frederick Schaefer, who opened their Manhattan brewery in 1842 Atthe time, most of the city’s lager drinkers came from within the German community, but that was soon

Deutscher’s delight The first beer saloon downtown was started on Broadway, just a little below Canal street, where similar experiments and disappointments were long the order of the day Soon after, lager beer saloons appeared with almost magical rapidity all over the City New York seemed to have broken out with a rash of them scarcely more than five years later It was not until about 1855, however, that any great number of Americans took kindly to the German drink Gradually they began to like the stuff.21

The Schaefers represent only one of the German beer-making dynasties to emerge in

nineteenth-century America The complete list contains some very familiar names, including Frederick Miller,Adolphus Busch, Captain Frederick Pabst, and Joseph Schlitz

For uptown New Yorkers, a cool glass of lager was the ideal warm-weather drink For residents

of Kleindeutschland, it was a daily staple, a fact which non-Germans marveled over: “They drink it

in the morning, at noon, in the evening and late at night, during their labors and their rest, alone andwith friends…They take lager as we do oxygen into our lungs—appearing to live and thrive on it.”22Just about every block in the German wards had at least one beer saloon, establishments where menlike Mr Glockner went to read the daily papers, play cards, talk politics, and conduct their business.The East Side saloons were the working man’s version of a private club:

A German must have time for his libations He cannot march up to the bar, pour out a drink, dash it down without the possibility of tasting it, toss the money over the counter, and rush out like an ignited sky-rocket, as the majority of Americans do Tables, chairs, newspapers, cigars or pipes, and friends are not merely comfortable additions, but

actual essentials to his enjoyment Instead of a quarter of a minute he wants at least a quarter of an hour for the proper enjoyment of a drink Conversation is another

essential However taciturn the German may appear among others, let him sit down at

one of these tables and get his glass of lager beer and a listening friend, and if anyone desires to know how much talk a human tongue can reel off in any given period, then is the time to listen.23

Americans consumed their alcohol with a rebellious drink-to-get-drunk attitude One result of thatwas the close association between drinking and brawling in American life The Germans, by contrast,reveled in the communal spirit that developed after a glass or two of lager They drank methodically,pacing themselves like marathoners to wring out every possible ounce of pleasure Though Americansadopted beer as their national drink, they never fully acquired the Germans’ flair for savoring it

For German home consumption, parents would send one of their kids down to the local saloonwith a tin pitcher or pail—East Siders called them “growlers”—which the barkeep would fill foraround fifteen cents The sight of young East Side kids shuffling home with growlers full of beer wascommonplace enough to catch the attention of Jacob Riis, New York’s best-known social reformer In

his now-classic How the Other Half Lives, Riis offers a possibly apocryphal story about one East

Side boy, who spent his Saturday ferrying growlers to his father’s workplace By evening, the kidwas so drunk he disappeared into a cellar to “sleep off the effects of his own share in the rioting.” OnMonday morning, after a weekend of desperate searching, the boy was discovered by his parents,dead and half-eaten by rats.24

In contrast to their American neighbors, the Germans saw beer as a family drink On Sundayafternoon, entire immigrant families (babies included) celebrated their one day of leisure with a trip

to the cavernous beer halls that lined the Bowery The largest and best known was the Atlantic

Gardens—a somewhat misleading name, since it wasn’t a garden at all, but a long, barrel-vaultedroom large enough to hold a blimp, or maybe two It was a highly functional space, designed to house

as many people as possible From the floor to the top of the ceiling, every interior surface was

adorned with an intricate pattern of swirling plaster medallions and curlicue borders The hangar-likeproportions of the hall, combined with the fancy plasterwork, gave it the feel of a gilded shed Araised gallery that projected into the room provided a stage for musicians During the day, sunlightstreamed in the hall from skylights at either end of the building At night, it glowed with the light ofthree gas-burning chandeliers, each one of them six feet in diameter

On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, when the room was full to capacity, the level of activity insidethe Atlantic Gardens must have been dizzying As an all-female band played from the gallery, a

crowd of three thousand men, women, and children were drinking, talking, and laughing The youngestfamily members, babies who were too young to sit at the table, were plunked on the floor by theirmothers’ feet, where they presented a tripping hazard to the hurrying waiters, their trays loaded withbeer mugs

A typical Sunday in a German beer garden, 1872, this one located on the Bowery.

Collection of the New-York Historical Society

Chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York were drawn to the beer halls for the vivid subjectmatter they provided They marveled at the vastness of the rooms, the quantity of beer consumed in asingle business day, and the quality of the house musicians The one subject no one seemed to care toomuch about was the food The most we can say is that it was hearty and simple Brown bread

seasoned with caraway, plates of Swiss and Limburger cheese, sliced ham, pickles, and salted

pretzels were all standard beer-hall fare Some patrons brought their own picnic-style snacks of

bread and sausage or bread and cheese—a practice welcomed by the beer-hall management so long

as they paid for the drinks

A more elaborate meal awaited diners at the German “lunch rooms” that once thrived in NewYork Down near the tip of the island, in the heart of the financial district, the lunch rooms served anall-male clientele of shipping agents, bankers, lawyers, and insurance brokers Mixed in among thebusinessmen were a scattering of journalists and engravers from nearby Printing House Square,

where all the city newspapers had their offices In fact, one German lunch room, the Rathskeller, was

housed in the basement of the Staats Zeitung, New York’s largest German-language newspaper.

There was also the Postkeller at the corner of Broadway and Barclay, Hollander’s at the intersection

of Broadway and Chambers, and Dietz on North William Street At these eateries, customers coulddine on a bowl of soup, a cut from a joint of meat, vegetables, salad, and a glass of beer, all for 35cents Ermich’s, at the corner of Nassau and John streets, was a crowded basement room with largecommunal tables where diners could start their meal with a bowl of smoked-sausage-and-lentil soup

If they wanted bread for dunking, they cut off a hunk from a shared loaf at the center of the table

(Etiquette at Ermich’s demanded that each diner wipe his knife across the top of the bread beforecutting his slice.) Entrées included fish balls smothered in red cabbage, Vienna sausage with “half-half” (a side dish that was half mashed potatoes and half sauerkraut), or a “fricatelleu [stew] of

minced meat surrounded by a browned crust composed of equal parts of flour and potato.” There wasalso schnitzel (fried veal cutlet), sliced tongue with raisin sauce, and a dish called “Hamburger

steak,” a form of ground beef “redeemed from its original toughness by being mashed into mincemeatand then formed into a conglomerated mass.”25 This not-too-appetizing description is among the

earliest reference to a future American staple, the hamburger, seen here at the very start of its culinary

The German restaurants that proliferated in nineteenth-century New York appealed to both

immigrant diners and native-born citizens In fact, of all the city’s foreign restaurants, French andItalian included, Americans showed the greatest admiration for those owned by Germans Their

fondness reflected how they perceived the immigrant himself Until World War I, when global

politics recast Germans as “enemy aliens,” Americans considered Germans the model immigrants—industrious, intelligent, highly cultivated, and impeccable in their personal hygiene Temperamentally,the German was jovial and attentive to his guests, qualities that made him an ideal restaurant host.And unlike Americans, constrained by their puritan discomfort with bodily pleasures, Germans knewhow to relish their food “Of all the foreign elements in town,” one New Yorker remarked, “nonedelight more in good eating and drinking than the Germans.”26 In the 1870s and 1880s, the hundreds ofGerman restaurants scattered through the city became popular gathering spots for New York

businessmen, professionals, and “clubmen,” who spent their leisure hours in the city’s many

gentlemen’s clubs The most celebrated German establishment was Sieghortner’s, located in the oldAstor mansion on Lafayette Place Guidebooks to New York listed Sieghortner’s among the city’spremier dining spots, ranking it second only to Delmonico’s

Around the corner, at Bleecker and Broadway, a very different crowd was assembled at a

German restaurant called Pfaff’s Named for its owner, Charles Pfaff, it served as the unofficial

headquarters for the city’s “Bohemian” set, making it one of the first “ethnic” eateries to attract

socially prominent New Yorkers Of course, Swiss-owned Delmonico was “ethnic” too, but in themost refined and elegant way possible Pfaff’s, by contrast, was a dive It opened early in the 1850s

in a dingy and ill-ventilated space that was literally under the Broadway sidewalk But that was part

of its charm The subterranean location gave it a hidden-in-plain-sight kind of allure captured by WaltWhitman, an honorary Bohemian and steady Pfaff’s customer:

The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers

meet to eat and carouse,

While on the walk immediately overhead pass the

myriad feet of Broadway.27

The part Whitman leaves out is that customers could actually look up and see the shadowy forms ofpassersby, visible through glass bull’s-eyes that had been set into the pavement

The Bohemians who gathered at Pfaff’s were the beatniks of their time Self-proclaimed rebels,they laughed at bourgeois respectability and flaunted social convention, sexual and otherwise Theirringleader was Henry Clapp, a newspaperman who returned from a trip to Paris fired up by Henry

Murger’s 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which is where the term “Bohemian” originates His followers included Ada Clare (a writer and actress), Edward Wilkins (drama critic for The

Herald), George Arnold (essayist and poet), Artemus Ward (a humorist), and the poet Walt Whitman,

who was more a revered spectator than a full-fledged participant

An unobtrusive but sympathetic character, Charley Pfaff, owner and host, became a minor

celebrity in his own right Contemporaries said he ran the best bar in New York, stocking it with abroad selection of the finest European wines He was better known, however, for his imported beer,the beverage of choice among his Bohemian clientele As you might imagine, the Bohemians liked to

arrive late Their midnight suppers consisted of oysters, steak, liver and bacon, and Welsh rarebit, thetypical foods of a New York chop house Alongside these American staples, the kitchen prepared

“foreign” specialties like pfankuchen, Frisbee-sized German pancakes It was a dish admired by the

Ohio-born novelist William Dean Howells on his visit to Pfaff’s in 1860

pancakes.28

The revelries under the sidewalk lasted until 1861, when the start of the Civil War effectively broke

up the Bohemian circle Though the sparkle was gone, Pfaff’s remained open at the same address(653 Broadway) for another fourteen years, then moved uptown to West 24th Street, following thecity’s shifting center of gravity The new restaurant was a money-losing proposition and closed forgood in 1887, three years before the death of its genial and once-famous owner

When Pfaff’s first opened in the 1850s, New York’s main entertainment district ran along LowerBroadway in the neighborhood that eventually became SoHo Over the next quarter-century, as thecity expanded northward, the Broadway theaters began to migrate uptown, pausing for a while at 14thStreet

For roughly three decades, the blocks between Third Avenue and Broadway on 14th Street

provided New Yorkers with a broad range of diversions, from opera performances at the Academy ofMusic to musical comedies starring Lillian Russell at the New Fourteenth Street Theater When theshows let out, all of those theatergoers needed somewhere to eat Their first choice was Luchow’s,one of many saloons that lined the wide corridor of 14th Street All of these businesses were

immigrant-owned and-run, serving up German, Austrian, and Hungarian cooking to a mixed crowd offellow immigrants, native New Yorkers, tourists, and visiting artists from around the world

One vivid portrait of Luchow’s comes from a hard-drinking New York journalist, BenjaminDeCasseres, who looks back on his favorite saloon through the lens of Prohibition Writing in 1931,

he remembers his first visit to Luchow’s nearly forty years earlier, when he was a young reporter justdiscovering New York:

The dark wood, the high ceiling, the ultra Teutonic waiters, the dripping bar, the

mounded free lunch, the heavenly odor of pig’s knuckles, sauerkraut, and Paprika

Schnitzel—all of the things saturated me with an indescribable feeling of contentment.

I anchored at the bar and discovered at once that the quality and the upkeep of the beer in the place were all that my crapulous newspaper friend had told me As it went

down—Seidel after Seidel—every atom of my body bloomed with radiant philanthropy Dill pickles and tiny raw onions burst in my throat and sprayed my brain with a fine tickle.29

DeCasseres was a fixture at the Luchow’s bar, where the Pilsners “tasted like moonlight.” Healso spent time in the dining room, eating his way through the Luchow’s menu Here are the dishes heremembered most fondly:

Veal Schnitzel with Wild Mushrooms

Boiled Beef with Horseradish

Bratwurst with Sauerkraut

Sauerbraten with Potato Dumplings

Stewed Goose with Calves’ Feet

Pan-fried Hamburger

Young Pigeon with Asparagus

Luchow’s specialized in roast goose, duck, and venison, and was likewise known for its crisp potatopancakes and homemade frankfurters

The Academy of Music closed in 1886, forced out of business by the newly built MetropolitanOpera House In time, the rest of the theaters followed suit Some closed permanently, others moveduptown to the more fashionable entertainment district around 42nd Street Robbed of their customers,the saloons vanished too Incredibly, Luchow’s managed to hang on until 1982, haunting 14th Streetlike a stranded visitor from another time

The journey from Ermich’s lunch room to Pfaff’s to Luchow’s traced a rough semicircle that

skirted the edges of Kleindeutschland All three establishments played a major part in the

transmission of German food ways to mainstream America The frankfurters and hamburgers eaten insimilar nineteenth-century German restaurants have become so thoroughly assimilated that we hardly

recognize them as German at all Within Kleindeutschland proper, however, immigrants like the

Glockners patronized smaller, less glamorous eateries where the crowds were exclusively German.Though scattered throughout the German wards, they were especially thick along the Bowery, thecenter of downtown nightlife, and on Avenue A, the Germans’ restaurant row

More than the Irish or Russians or Italians, the Germans saw eating as a public activity, anoccasion to leave the tenement and venture into the larger world The typical immigrant restaurantdisplayed its offerings along the bar, which doubled as a buffet counter, the food arranged like aFlemish still life A visitor to one such eating place, stunned by the copious display, described howthe bar was

piled with joints and manufactured meats adapted to the strong German stomach;— enormous fat hams, not thoroughly boiled, for the German prefers his pig underdone: rounds of cold corned beef, jostled by cold roast legs and loins of veal; pyramids of sausages of every known size and shape, and several cognate articles of manufactured swine meat….

There were also baskets of freshly baked pretzels, mounds of Swiss and Limburger cheese, heaps ofsliced onion, earthenware jars of caviar and a large glass jar of pickled oysters The attached diningroom, its walls painted with mountain scenery, was busy throughout the day and deep into the night, afeeding ground for German tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, often accompanied by theirwives and children Both at home and in public, Germans preferred to dine as a family.30

But public dining on a grand scale was connected with the many clubs and societies that formed

the core of German social life in nineteenth-century New York Known as Vereine, they were a

carryover from the Old Country The Vereine developed in Germany during the late 1700s, part of a

new city-based culture in which merchants and trades people banded together in professional andpolitical associations, representing their interests as the new German middle class As German

immigrants recreated the Vereine in New York, the clubs lost their political edge, or most of it, and

became more purely social

Just about every New York German belonged to at least one Verein, and some belonged to many

of them, especially if they were reasonably well-off and could afford the membership fees Any

shared experience or common interest was reason to join a Verein Some were organized around

place of origin, while others were based on occupation, like the German grocers’ or brewers’

Vereine Common-interest Vereine were for serious lovers of poetry or music or drama or athletics,

though some were based on the flimsiest of excuses In the 1880s, a group of German Jews living in

Harlem established a Schnorrer’s (Yiddish for “moocher”) Verein, which hosted an annual

clambake Among the most prominent Vereine in Kleindeutschland were German singing societies

like the Arion Club, which sang President Lincoln’s funeral hymn on the steps of City Hall as hisbody lay in state in the Grand Rotunda

The Vereine met in saloons, beer halls, and other public spaces, like the Germania Assembly

Rooms on the Bowery or the Odd Fellows’ Hall on Forsyth Street The larger clubs had their ownprivate headquarters, some of which are still standing A building on St Mark’s Place in the East

Village still carries the inscription Deutsche-Amerikanische Schutzengesellschaft, one of the

neighborhood’s many shooting clubs The clubs staged musical performances, athletic

demonstrations, and theatrical shows Fond of processions, they were often seen parading through thestreets of New York carrying banners or torches During the winter holiday season, they held masked

balls (the reason Kleindeutschland had so many costume shops) and elaborate banquets In summer, individual clubs joined forces, hosting enormous Volksfest that combined all the Germans’ favorite

activities: eating and drinking, shooting and athletics, singing and dancing

The Volksfest began with a procession as the immigrants traveled en masse to one of the

downtown ferry landings Some societies paraded in costume The most dashing belonged to the

German Turnverein, a club that joined progressive thinking and gymnastics in one overarching

philosophy The headquarters for the Turnverein was at 27–33 Orchard Street in a building that once

served as a Quaker meeting house When the paraders left the hall, heading uptown on their way to theEast River, they would have marched directly in front of 97 Orchard When they did, the OrchardStreet tenants must have run to their window to watch the passing show This one took place in thesummer of 1862, a year before the building went up:

The procession formed a gallant and striking spectacle The Turners, in their uniforms

of white jackets and pants, with gay kerchiefs tied around their necks, and neat black Kossuth hats, the many richly embroidered banners, the numerous and well-trained

music corps, the companies of happy looking cadets, and then, along the sidewalks, the accompanying throng and interminable train of buxom women, nearly all lugging along huge chubby-cheeked babies or followed by troops of roly-poly children, some of whom were just able to toddle—all these indispensable and inevitable features of the German

“Fest-tag” were there in rare profusion, brightening even the August sunshine to a

ruddier glow.31

When the paraders arrived at the ferry landing, they were literally shipped off to the picnic ground inHoboken, New Jersey, or Upper Manhattan, which still offered large tracts of undeveloped land

At the largest festivals, the number of people might reach twenty or thirty thousand The amount

of food and drink required to satisfy a crowd that size must have been staggering Equally dauntingwere the logistics of preparing and transporting it in an era before the mechanized kitchen and takeoutcontainers It is unclear exactly who supplied the food at the picnics, though some of it came fromrestaurant kitchens inside the various parks It was sold from booths or stands that were set up inshady areas, usually under a tree The kinds of food consumed are already familiar to us What’s new

is the quantity: colossal mounds of herring salad, heaps of sauerkraut the size of small haystacks, andgiant sheets of honey cake But the items that seemed to dominate the picnics were sausages, potatoes,and beer At a picnic in Brooklyn’s Ridgewood Park,

In all directions were arrayed booths and stalls in which edibles were prepared and offered for sale Frankfurter sausages were in great demand, while the supply of potato pancakes was something enormous The consumption of lager beer kept the brewers’ carts busy continually coming and going with kegs of beer.32

The vendors at a picnic in Harlem provided “sausages of different sizes from the small one of a

finger’s size to the enormous wurst two yards long and two feet in circumference.”33

American visitors to the German picnics were awed by the sight of so many people, eating,

drinking, dancing, shooting their rifles, and generally celebrating In June of 1855, the Saengverein,

one of the German singing societies, hosted a picnic at Elm Park on Staten Island A New York

journalist who was sent to cover the event returned with the following report:

We never saw the like before! Such a pouring down of lager bier, such swarms of

Germans, such extravagantly jolly times, we should not have expected to see if we

planned a year’s travel and tarry in Germany as we saw yesterday in Elm Park…Before

1 o’clock from twelve to fourteen thousand persons were already busily enjoying

themselves, and still for a couple of hours longer they kept streaming in at both

entrances.34

Visitors were equally impressed by the spirit of orderliness that prevailed at the picnics, despite thesize of the gathering and the amount of drinking that took place Somewhere in that frolicsome butwell-mannered mob were the Glockners, Wilhelmina sitting under a tree on the slightly damp earth

Her infant son nestled beside her, lying on his father’s out-spread handkerchief The two of them arewaiting for the return of Mr Glockner, who has temporarily disappeared into the crowd in search ofgrilled bratwurst.

CHAPTER TWO

The Moore Family

Potatoes—! Kindly Root, most Cordial Friend,

That Ever Nature to this Isle did send!

Potatoes; oh hard Fate! all dead and gone?

And with them thousands of our selves anon!

’Twas you, deceas’d dear friends, kept us alive,

Vain, vain are all our Hopes long to survive!

—ANONYMOUS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRISH POET1

It was the size of a boy’s fist, though not so well-formed Its crackled skin was covered with sunken,purplish-black marks, splattered like paint Sliced in half, the pale interior was marbled with thick,rust-colored veins Poke it with your finger, and the spongy flesh oozed a foul-smelling liquid…

This lopsided, rotting form was a blighted Irish potato, victim of the fungus-like parasite

Phytophthora infestans The blight that struck Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, triggering the

deadliest famine in the history of modern Europe, originated in central Mexico sometime around

1840 From there, it migrated to the United States in 1843, first detected by New England farmerswho were mystified by its lethal handiwork The following year, it was carried to Europe with ashipment of seed potatoes, spreading through Belgium, Germany, France, and England, then leapingover the sea to Ireland in 1845 Here, it found ideal growing conditions—cool temperatures and

plenty of rain According to Irish observers, the parasite worked on its host with such efficiency thatentire fields, green and healthy one day, were black and withered within the week The blight

returned in 1846, this time causing a total failure of the Irish potato crop, the national staple, leavingmost of the country with virtually nothing to eat Incredibly, it endured for nearly a decade,

hibernating over the winter then blooming to life each spring until it was finally killed off by a

warmer, drier weather pattern

In 1840, the population of Ireland was over eight million, and still quickly growing Within

fifteen years, more than a quarter of that number had vanished One and a half million Irish had died

of starvation, or of famine-related diseases, such as typhus or cholera Approximately two millionwere lost to emigration, some to England and Scotland but most to America, producing another

demographic shift, this one in New York

When the nineteenth century began, New York was in many ways an English city Most of itsinhabitants were of English descent; they belonged to the Church of England, drank English-style ale,and paid for it with English-named coins The great influx of Irish immigrants between 1845 and 1860changed the city’s ethnic composition, so by 1860 it was a quarter Irish, and nearly a third Catholic.Included in that exodus were Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore (her future husband), the focus of our

present story.

Bridget came first, in 1863, and Joseph in 1865, the final year of the American Civil War As far

as we know, both traveled alone, sailing from Liverpool to New York If they had good weather, thetransatlantic voyage took each of them roughly twelve days Most of that time was spent in the ship’ssteerage, a space designed for the transport of cargo, not people A low-ceilinged deck of six feet orless, steerage was typically divided into three sections: one for single men, another for women, andthe third for families The portholes were the only source of light and fresh air, and during bad

weather even they were shut tight The passengers in steerage, a mix of Irish, English, Scots, and

Germans, slept on bare wooden berths six feet long and eighteen inches wide After 1849, ships

sailing from Britain were compelled by law to allot each steerage passenger sixteen square feet ofspace, a good indication of the crowding that existed before the statute was passed

Two or more weeks at sea, confined in tight quarters, posed considerable health risks Steeragepassengers regularly came down with typhus, also called “ship’s fever,” and many died en route Anincubator for disease, the steerage compartment was also a tinder box for the emotions of frightened,drunk, frustrated, and bored travelers of diverse backgrounds, suddenly thrown together The

following travel advice came from a newly landed immigrant named Mary McCarthy, writing back toher family in Ireland:

Take courage and be determined and bold as the first two or three days will be the worst

to you and mind whatever happens on board keep your own temper, do not speak angry

or hasty The mildest man has the best chance on board.2

Mary also recommends that her family travel with a bottle of whiskey, doling out an occasional glass

of it to the ship’s cook and the sailors, as it could do “no harm.” But life in steerage wasn’t all grim.Passengers entertained themselves with card games, singing, music, and dancing In the evenings, as

an accordion player pumped out tunes, Irishwomen danced reels in the aisles Children clapped to themusic, while men drank toasts to the promise of their new lives in America, filling the compartmentwith a fog of blue tobacco smoke

As to the food in steerage, travelers have left us with dramatically conflicting reports In the firstdecades of the nineteenth century, passengers were responsible for supplying their own provisions,and for cooking them, too On the upper deck, in a primitive kitchen known as the steerage galley, theyboiled potatoes, oatmeal, salt beef, and water for tea, their cooking pot suspended from a hook over ahot grate They ate and drank from tin cups and plates, two more items they were required to providefor themselves (A thin straw mattress, a pot, tin plate, fork, and spoon became known as the

“immigrant’s kit.”) Another way for the shipping lines to increase their profit, the bring-your-ownsystem was fraught with problems The steerage galleys were much too small, and fights erupted asfamilies vied for cooking time A more serious drawback was that many steerage passengers weresimply too poor to provide for themselves and either brought nothing or ran out of food before theship reached its destination

To save the immigrant passenger from starvation and other dangers at sea, statutes were passed

in both the United States and Britain to improve and regulate steerage conditions One result of thateffort was that, beginning in 1848, ships were required to furnish each passenger with the following:sixty gallons of water, thirty-five pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of ship’s biscuits, and ten pounds

each of wheat flour, oatmeal, rice, salt pork, and peas and beans It was just enough food to last

through the transatlantic journey which, at the time, averaged thirty-five to forty days The steeragegalleys were still mobbed, however, and wholly inadequate to meet the demands placed on them Indesperation, passengers ate their food raw, mixing flour and water into a paste and gulping it down asbest they could

By the time of Bridget’s journey, it had become routine for ships to provide their passengerswith cooked meals They were eaten down in steerage on collapsible tables that were no more thancrude boards balanced on trestles On some ships, tables were lowered from the ceiling into the

aisles, creating an impromptu dining room that was hoisted back up when the meal was over Threetimes a day, stewards descended the narrow staircase with oversize cooking vessels, and dished outthe contents For breakfast, there was porridge with molasses, or salt fish; for lunch, boiled beef andpotatoes; and for dinner, bread or biscuits and tea Even if the meat was rank and the bread moldy, to

a half-starved Irish peasant the quantity and variety was extravagant, a good omen for all the goodeating that lay ahead

The biographies of Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore are representative of the larger Irishmigration on several counts First and most important, both arrived in New York young and

unmarried: Bridget was seventeen, and Joseph twenty Where other national groups—the Germans,Italians, and Russians, for example—settled in the United States as families, the Irish migration wasessentially a movement of teenagers Though many sent money home to bring over brothers or sisters

or cousins, parents were generally left behind The Irish were also the only major immigrant group inwhich women outnumbered men Amid the cultural and economic changes in post-famine Ireland,women’s status declined drastically For many, a relatively inexpensive ticket to America was theonly way to improve their lot

Very little is known about Bridget’s life during her first two years alone in New York If shewere fortunate, the still “green” Miss Meehan had a cousin or some other relative already in America

to unravel the mysterious workings of her adopted home The hard-edged geometry of the Americancity was utterly alien to the Irish immigrant The ceaseless motion of both men and machines testedthe newcomer’s very sanity One young Irishman, writing home to his family in 1894, tried to conveythe strangeness of his current home “This country is very different from the old one,” he tells them:

The houses are of brick five to nine stories high with flat roofs on which people walk as

in a garden…The streets here are paved with stones, and as they are filled with driven vans at all hours—the streets are as bright by night as day—the din and uproar is something horrid Add to this the elevated railways running 30 feet above the avenues,

fast-as the cross-streets are called, the trains flying after one another like furies, and

thousands of factories and steamboats whistling and roaring all the time.3

Letters from home were a salve to the disoriented and uprooted immigrant, but the waiting time

between letters brought its own torments A young Irishwoman living in Brooklyn in the 1880s hints atthe terror she experienced waiting for the letter that never seems to arrive:

My dear Mamma,

What on earth is the matter with you all, that none of ye would think of writing to me.

The fact is I am heartsick fretting I cannot sleep the night and if I chance to sleep I

wake up with frightful dreams To think it’s now going and gone into the third month since you wrote to me I feel as if I’m dead to the world.4

What the lonesome immigrant seemed to crave most was information about relatives and friends inIreland Writing to her sister back home, a young New York immigrant named Mary Brown asks fornews on aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, siblings and neighbors, mentioning each by name andwondering who among them is in good health, who is sick, and who has been married Just beforesigning off, Mary asks her sister to send her a locket of hair as a tangible keepsake

Mary Brown worked as a domestic for a family on West 13th Street Most likely, Bridget

Meehan began her life as an American wage-earner in just the same way, as a servant, a maid or

pantry girl, working for a New York family that also provided her with room and board Disparaged

by native-born citizens, domestic ser vice was a form of work open to immigrants and people of

color, and by the 1850s it was dominated by Irishwomen

The Irish found domestic jobs through other immigrants, who acted as unofficial employmentagents Working in America as maids or cooks, they spread the word that an honest, industrious

relative back in Ireland was looking for a domestic position, so when she arrived, a job was waitingfor her If she had no connections, a newly arrived immigrant could find work through a commercialemployment agency, or “intelligence office,” as they were known, many of them located downtown,near the docks The typical intelligence office demanded money from the immigrants they were

supposed to help, charging a fee—between 50 cents and a dollar—just to register, and additional feesafter that Even shadier, some respectable-seeming offices were fronts for less wholesome activities.Young girls who stumbled into them expecting to find work with a local family were sent instead toone of the many hundreds of brothels that once flourished in New York To protect work-hungry

immigrants, in 1850 the New York State Commissioners of Emigration opened the Labor Exchange,

an office that served both women and men looking for work in New York, or anywhere else in theUnited States The majority of people who registered with the Exchange were unskilled workers inlow-paying jobs The men were laborers, and the women servants, mostly German and Irish BridgetMeehan may have been among them

The demand for immigrant servants in nineteenth-century America was insatiable If a householdwas well-to-do or even middle-class, its every function was in the hands of domestic workers

Beyond cleaning, servants were responsible for laundering and ironing, for lighting lamps, fireplaces,and furnaces They took care of the children, nursed the sick, received visitors, and cooked and

served the family meals The housewife’s job was to manage her staff, even though she may have had

no hands-on experience of the tasks they performed If a servant suddenly quit or was hurt or sick, thehousehold was thrown into a tumult until a replacement was found If the family cook came down withthe flu, the housewife was unable to step in and fix dinner, because she had never learned how tocook

With so much riding on their staff, the job of finding good servants was a much-discussed topicamong nineteenth-century housewives In the second half of the century, running debates on the

“servant question” appeared in the women’s advice columns, now and then boiling over onto the

editorial page One question of enduring interest was: “Which nationality makes the best servants?”

As a rule, housewives looked on their immigrant servants as partly formed and childlike beings.The word they used for it was “raw.” A German or English or Swiss girl, newly landed, was raw in

exactly the right way—untainted and malleable Raw Irish maids, by contrast, were “Dirty, impudent,careless, wasteful, and for incompetence they take the premium, but what can you expect when most

of them are just off the ‘bogs’?”5 The critique comes from a New York homemaker, venting her

domestic frustrations in a letter to the editor Her biting words, one isolated expression of much

broader anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings that had taken hold of America, placed the Irish servant

in a highly peculiar position The same women who battered their Irish maids with insults also relied

on them to keep their families clean and fed Scorned and ridiculed, the Irish maid was also

indispensable, a fact she came to grasp, using it to her advantage in ways small and large When aservant was applying for a new job, it gave her a clear negotiating advantage over her much wealthierAmerican mistress It also made her exceedingly hard to get rid of Despite all their moaning,

American housewives, in the interest of domestic stability, were reluctant to fire their Irish maids,among the lowest paid of any nationality Besides, the job of finding a new one was so onerous, itwas ultimately less trouble to put up with the servants they already had, despite their glaring

imperfections

According to American householders, the incompetence of the Irish servant reached its fullestexpression in the kitchen Her specialties: blackened steaks, scorched coffee, gummy puddings,

leaden pastries, and broken china, only the most expensive pieces This ceaseless griping was in part

a matter of prior experience—or, rather, the lack of it Most nineteenth-century Irishwomen arrived inthe United States with very limited culinary skills If they were country people, as many were, theyknew how to cook over an open peat-fire but had never used a stove, or even seen one Indoor

plumbing was equally alien, not to mention the foods themselves Beyond boiling, they had scantknowledge of culinary technique It was a cruel irony that “domestic cook” was one of the few jobsAmericans were willing to grant them

Living and working among the native-born, observing their domestic habits at very close range,the Irish servant received a crash course in the food culture of middle-class America At the mostnuts-and-bolts level, she was tutored in the mechanics of the American kitchen For the Irish, thatincluded how to operate a coal-burning stove, a contraption most had never seen before More

abstractly, she was introduced to American food traditions and assumptions She learned, for

example, what to feed a growing child (cheap cuts of beef and lamb, “mild” vegetables like peas andcarrots, home-baked brown bread), what constitutes a nourishing breakfast (porridge, mutton chops,fish steaks), what foods should be served at a ladies’ luncheon (raw oysters, bouillon, lobster,

sweetbreads in pastry), and what to cook for the Thanksgiving table (more oysters, roast turkey,

chicken pie, creamed onions, mince pie, pumpkin pie) When she quit her job to marry and start afamily, the typical pattern among Irish servants, she brought her knowledge of American food waysinto her new life, applying it, piecemeal, to her own cooking

Joseph Moore began his working life in America as a waiter, another job that often fell to

immigrants or people of color At some point, he also worked as a barkeep Not only immigrants, butpoor and working-class New Yorkers rarely stayed in one job for very long Rather, they bouncedfrom one to the next, following the changing demands of the city’s job market, which rose and fellaccording to the season In the winter months, for example, when construction slowed, work wasscarce for bricklayers, carpenters, and other laborers For waiters, it was just the opposite Winterwas their boom season But in the oppressive summer heat, when upper-class New York escaped tothe shore or the mountains, city restaurants lost their clientele and waiters lost their jobs

From the early nineteenth century onward, immigrants have played a vital part in feeding

America Working in jobs traditionally rejected by the native-born, they have peddled fruit,